![]() ![]() In the 2010 documentary I Am Comic, Weinbach describes one variety of comedy performance: “Sometimes there’s something that somebody does that goes beyond words. He seems to know that this is what he’s up to. Instead his comedy comes across as musical in the sense that what’s both funny and skillful about his routines tends to be the same thing that would be interesting in a piece of music: dissonance, counterpoint, harmony. Weinbach also doesn’t do the playing-an-instrument-gently-to-add-atmosphere-while-telling-jokes shtick (cf., recently, Demetri Martin and Zach Galifianakis)-though he has the chops for that, having played lounge piano professionally in the Bay Area for a few years after graduating from Berkeley. ![]() ![]() His work generally is musical, that is, but mostly not in the funny-songs sense ( à la Tom Lehrer or, l’havdil, Bo Burnham)-though this latest album does close with a tunefully scatological number that isn’t entirely dissimilar to some of Weird Al’s originals, if performed more sincerely and as a duet with an innocent audience volunteer. (The only tacit admission that there might be comic value in this bafflingly recondite, straight-faced endeavor is in a video posted this fall reinventing the podcast as a Solid Gold-style dance program.)Īt his best, though, Weinbach creates a kind of comedy that’s not about allusions to particular pop culture phenomena of the past or present, but all about sound and rhythm. Having had a 1980s and ’90s childhood helps, it turns out, to appreciate some of Weinbach’s comic output, like a grim My Buddy-commercial parody, or his so-completely-unflinchingly-serious-it’s-amusing podcast, The Legacy Music Hour, about 8-bit video game music from the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Famicom. How seriously could one regard the world, having grown up, like he did, on the awkward margins of B-list Hollywood? Weinbach’s sister, Laura, a musician, notes on her website that she “grew up in a musical household that embraced eccentricity” and that her “next-door neighbors were circus contortionists with emus and fang-toothed monkeys as pets,” while other folks in the vicinity included “Slash, Ice-T, and Larry from Perfect Strangers.” Weinbach himself was probably telling the truth, too, when he let me know that as a kid, he auditioned for the lead in the horror movie Child’s Play. Weinbach’s was the kind of childhood home that incubates humor not neatly aligned with any commercial category-whether or not it was inevitably so because of the collision of Filipino and Jewish culture, each of which has its own distinct history of domination by imperial powers and laughter through tears. Can you guess which one’s his mom and which his dad? “Because I’m half Filipino and half Jewish,” Weinbach says, introducing one bit on the new album, “a lot of people ask me, ‘Who’s Filipino? Your mother or your father?’ ” Pause. King-featuring instructional video Country & Blues Harmonica for the Absolute Beginner (1984). If he’s an absurdist, he comes by that perspective honestly: He’s the son of a Filipino pianist and a Hollywood producer and writer responsible for both the vintage B-movie The Freakmaker (1974) and the B.B. Or just to say that he’s one of the most formally inventive stand-up comedians currently practicing. It helps, maybe, to say that in 2007 he won the Andy Kaufman Award. ![]() What Weinbach is, exactly, can be a little difficult to describe in prose. Neither is he the kind of voice-character performer, like Nick Kroll, for whom the stand-up stage seems like a place to try out bits while waiting for a sketch show to begin filming. Weinbach does these voices sure-footedly, if always not pitch-perfectly, but he isn’t exactly an impressionist. In the first 15 minutes of his third album, Mostly Live, released last year, comedian Brent Weinbach briefly speaks in the accents of the following people: a teenage Latino video blogger a reggae hype-man a Frenchman singing “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio “a Vietnamese jazz vocalist who works as a waiter during the day” Karen, “a young woman … wearing a beige blouse and a brown knit skirt” and James, “a professional black male living in San Francisco.” Janu| comedy, essays, interviews, tablet magazine ![]()
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